second post of the day - yesterday in the garden




Yesterday at the garden I took some time to play with very simple short words. Trying to integrate them into the space. Thinking of different ways to bring written text into the space, creating a dialogue between the inside and the ideas. The attempt was to use the existing garden material in order to create these transitory shapes for a garden that cannot be permanently modified. My main concern now is the constant transformation of the seasons and how much intervention can be planned now. Will the leaves still be on the floor a few months from now? Will the pond still be dense green? How will the garden's inherent narrative change as the colours and foliage change?

what is it that interests me about text - aspirations

It is not the creation of an elaborate complicated text which will demand extreme attention of its listeners. It is not the development of a narrative. It is the game of time, the transformation and encounter of times within the poetic language. It is the rearrangement of the real enabled by discourse. It is the medium of words as tools for expressing the invisible and connecting us to what is absent. It is the parallel world which exists through words, transforming concepts into sensations. It is to create a circular text which exists within itself, like a dance, within its movements; a linear text that articulates with the exterior, that speaks of something outside its boundaries and yet transcends it. An arrangement of sounds, when sounds, or an arrangement of forms, that refers more to itself than to anything else, reminding the espectator of the subtleties of language, of poetry, of images that exist primarily through words. The espectators should feel this existence. I want “sound and all its echos to make the concrete surface of the poem dense.” And to remind the audience that “if in the end of the passage image seems to have exceeded discourse, this overcome was also true in the opposite sense: in order to reach the completion of the image, it was necessary to unfasten a chain of words.” *

I intend to create a performance determined by the deliverance of verbal text and in its creations, however, this should be done in a way that sequence is not important, that fragments overcome the whole. A circular storytelling which escapes from beginings and ends, losing itself in repetitions.

* the quotes are extracts from Alfredo Bosi's O Tempo e o Ser da Poesia, translated from Portuguese to the best of my habilities.

the audience

We have been discussing our intentions. We have been posting our research ideas. We have been ellaborating what we want to express. It is subjective and it will be still once we have established what the audience should perceive and consider. Inevitably we are individuals making work that we would like to see. That we want to give birth to. However, even if this question, when answered, remains somewhat in a subjective level, it must be asked, for it will determine our choices. If I could I would give all my favourite poetryfor each person I love to read, and yet would it make sense for that or would it be just too much, too diverse, may be each project is the choice of one poetry, one intention, one author...

Lizzy and I have had many ideas, beautiful ideas, visual and conceptual, however, in order to examine their relevance we must know what we want our audience to experience. I would answer this question by writing that they should experience what we experienced when we read The Invisible Cities. Our experience is the core of our choice to use this book. As I see it, we chose this book because it reflected in some way our relationship of foreigner and native, our exchange of experience, but most of all because it questions how much of the present is real, how much it is modified by past experiences; it questions how much of one place can be modified by the outside (the surroundings) and how our perception of the other place changes as we share it through thoughts, through words, from the present space.

I would like the audience to walk through the garden and consider what is present in that space, what has been seen on the way there and in which way these experiences change their experience of the garden as well as, once they leave, how much of the garden will affect their journey back home, or wherever they go. I believe what we want the audience to experience is contained in a conversation that Kublai Kahn and Marco Polo have in the garden. That conversation is the starting point and it will be given to our audience. The duality of inside the garden and everywhere else, all that is not in that present space, is what they should consider as they walk through bushes, under trees and hear of journeys to foreign land. This should also be experienced through a character which is present everywhere but which in reality, is never physically there.

One character is poetry immersed and represented through poetry. And the garden, her garden, keeps her poetry and changes through this poetry. She attempts to change the garden, the garden changes her. The other character, the traveller, is the storyteller. She speaks of places she has been and people she has seen. The references are in the garden but she hardly speaks of it. There is a narrative in the story, actually five narratives, cyclic stories that never come to an end. The importance of the stories is not the stories in itself but the event of joining people, of telling it, of listening, of the language and expressions used for presenting it.

Each story is cut by a meeting within the story, a meeting with another character's story that will then carry on without ever completing the first one. This is where the characters meet, it is not in the garden. It is not in space and time, but through their stories, connecting stories.

There is also someone who knows of plants, who knows of change. Someone who also knows why we are there, the purposes and events that led to this meeting. She is not a character but she also has a story to tell, a story of fragments, time and space. It is a piece of history given in an unexpected way. In a poetic way. She might take you by the hand and show something no one else will see, tell you a secret.

These are three of the essencial elements. Then, there is the garden. What can one say about the garden? What can we say about the garden in months to come? You have to go and see it!